Indetermination of this imaginative form.--Inferior forms: the industrious, the unstable, the eccentric. Why people of lively imagination are changeable.--Superstitious beliefs. Origin of this form of imagination--its mental mechanism and its elements.--The higher form--mechanical imagination.--Man has expended at least as much imagination there as in esthetic creation.--Why the contrary view prevails.--Resemblances between these two forms of imagination.--Identity of development. Detail observation--four phases.--General characters. This form, at its best, supposes inspiration; periods of preparation, of maturity, and of decline.--Special characters: invention occurs in layers. Principal steps of its development.--It depends strictly on physical conditions.--A phase of pure imagination--mechanical romances. Examples.--Identical nature of the imagination of the mechanic and that of the artist. 256 CHAPTER VI. THE COMMERCIAL IMAGINATION. Its internal and external conditions.--Two classes of creators--the cautious, the daring.--The initial moment of invention.--The importance of the intuitive mind.--Hypotheses in regard to its psychologic nature.--Its development: the creation of increasingly more simple processes of substitution.--Characters in common with the forms of creation already studied.--Characters peculiar to it--the combining imagination of the tactician; it is a form of war.--Creative intoxication.--Exclusive use of schematic representations.--Remarks on the various types of images.--The creators of great financial systems.--Brief remarks on the military imagination. 281 CHAPTER VII. THE UTOPIAN IMAGINATION. Successive appearances of ideal conceptions.--Creators in ethics and in the social realm.--Chimerical forms. Social novelists.--Ch. Fourrier, type of the great imaginer.--Practical invention--the collective ideal.--Imaginative regression. 299 CONCLUSION. I. _The foundations of the creative imagination._ Why man is able to create: two principal conditions.--"Creative spontaneity," which resolves itself into needs, tendencies, desires.--Every imaginative creation has a motor origin.--The spontaneous revival of images.--The creative imagination reduced to three forms: outlined, fixed, objectified. Their peculiar characteristics. 313 II. _The imaginative type._ A view of the imaginative life in all its stages.--Reduction to a psychologic law.--Four stages characterized: 1, by the _quantity_ of images; 2, by their _quantity and intensity_; 3, by quantity, intensity and duration; 4, by the complete and permanent systematization of the imaginary life.--Summary. 320 APPENDICES. OBSERVATIONS AND DOCUMENTS. A. The various forms of inspiration. 335